While I have some quibbles with the numbers used in this question, particularly since it includes negatively-scoring and closed FRs to inflate the total number that exist, I figure it's worth at least talking through this and giving a bit of context.
The first question I'd ask y'all is - what do you want us spending time on? As someone who's been a highly-engaged user for many years prior to working here, I understand that there's some frustration when you keep putting ideas out there and get nothing in return from a voice you consider authoritative. It also feels really good when you do get an explanation or response that you can understand.
But you know what feels bad? Getting a status tag with no explanation. Because, particularly if the status is status-declined, when it happens to me, I've felt really frustrated and like the person who tagged the question doesn't understand the request and you start to assume they're just declining the request without a reason.
As such, we strive to explain declines so that we can show that we've thought about the request and determined that we don't think it's a good solution. As you might expect, that can take a lot of time. It means that I have to read the request, think about it, confer with other CMs or devs, and then create a coherent explanation of why we're not going to do the thing.
That takes a lot of time! We've never treated meta like a GitHub repository where someone can open an issue ticket and expect every ticket to be responded to by the project maintainers - we rely on and appreciate the efforts of our community members to review many of these and respond to them, either by voting or answering or leaving comments. As such, I'd argue that we don't need to respond to many of the FRs.
So, some numbers:
So, I'm down to ~1-2k questions that seem to have good community engagement and agreement and, at this point, my ability to assess the questions as a group is limited without going through each of them individually to put them in different buckets but I'd invite y'all to poke around a bit more if you like. I'm pretty sure some of the FRs are really discussion or support questions - it's common for questions to get both FR and discussion or FR and support.
It also seems like at least some of these questions simply haven't been tagged yet but could have been. For example, Adam Lear answered this and even said "I have to decline this" - and yet it has no status tag but someone else took the time to find all of the images and post them in an answer. While this is just one example, it brings in another point -
You all - community members - you do a lot of the work responding to these.
These responses can be anything of the below or more:
... and so there's often no need to have any interaction from staff. I'd be curious how many of these questions really don't need any additional support - though I wouldn't recommend y'all go on a flagging spree to find and flag every well-received FR that should have a status-completed or status-declined tag - because that could annoy the mods.
I understand that, if you're the sort who really likes things to be neat and buttoned-up, it can be difficult to see the bulk of stuff here as "incomplete". While I wish more things had status tags, I don't think there's a chance that every FR question will ever get one, if only because the bulk of them would be status declined either because they were disliked (negative-score/closed) or didn't have enough support to indicate a change was needed (low-score).
So, how does the team address these?
As JNat wrote in a comment - we have a process for bringing FRs and bugs to the attention of staff (TL;DR, anything with a status-review tag gets pulled into our Jira "Switchboard" for CM review). Three times a week (usually) we triage everything that gets a status-review tag, network wide, and direct it to the best team to investigate or respond. Bugs generally get sent to the dev team associated with the bug while FRs may be assessed by the Community Ops team and then either sent to a product team to be added to a backlog or, if more discussion is needed, sent to one of the CM teams to determine whether the feature is a good fit.
For stuff that we're deciding to decline either during the triage process or once sent to a team, we have someone work on drafting an explanation for why we aren't building the feature. The meta post linked above also has answers for different time periods with data describing how many posts get escalated to us and what our response rates are.
In addition to this, whenever we start big projects we dig through meta posts on MSE and MSO in particular to find feature requests as part of our research process to better understand what the community thinks and some features in that area that you'd like to see. While we can't always include the specific requests, we try to understand what the problem is - what friction are the people who requested and support these features experiencing.
This is why it's of paramount importance for y'all to explain the problem as part of a feature request. Potential solutions are good to have but it's possible that a specific solution isn't possible or simple to implement whereas we can make a small change that will have the same impact in alleviating the friction.
So, to circle back to my first question - "what do you want us spending time on?" - while I don't think we're doing everything we can, I pretty strongly feel that responding to every feature request isn't sustainable - particularly closed and low-scoring FRs. We have limited numbers of team members and lots of work to do as it is and we need to use those hours effectively. If we had double the staff, maybe we could do this - but we're trying to address the gaps by giving y'all a way to bring things to our attention, particularly when they're in areas we're currently working on.
One of the things I would like to do this year is review all of the posts that have tags like status-review, status-deferred, status-planned, and status-reproduced both here on MSO and on MSE so that we can clear out any that were tagged prior to this process and respond to or update the status of the posts. Once this gets completed, all of the questions with those tags currently would be ones we were actively tracking in Jira - which I think will be a lot more useful for y'all, than the status-quo of having a mishmash of the two.
† - Yes, I understand that userscripts aren't always the answer but because it'd be nearly impossible for us to make all of the minute requests possible, they are a big part of our ecosystem for UI customizations and I think there are definitely cases where the community agrees that a userscript is all that is needed.
duplicate:0on your search, the results decrease to 4.8k. It's still relevant, but worth mentioning that duplicate questions don't need a [status-*] tag.